As I blog about doorway pages, again I was faced with the ethical side of search engine optimization.

The more I think of it, the more I think it is out of context.

Ethics in SEO has nothing to do morality, nor there is a group of people who govern how all search engines should behave and how web publishers should follow an acceptable conduct.

Being ethical in SEO is more about complying specifically with the search engine you want to optimize for.

For instance, Google don’t want you to use hidden texts. They could easily detect that and delist your pages if you do that. There may be ways to cheat the spiders and algorithms but in order to stay on the safe side, you are recommended to stay “ethical.”

The same thing with doorway pages. If doorway pages are allowed, then there are too much control on the side of website publishers to cheat search engine rankings.

But, all we could do is comply. Google has create their search engine algorithms to work if publishers comply with the guidelines. They even have gone so far as to actually enforce some of them.

Everything that is against the guidelines is considered unethical.

That is my simple take on this matter. What do you think?

Doorway pages have gained bad names because the way they cheat search engines into believing their pages are worth the rankings.

Why doorway pages have become ineffective

This method of obtaining search engine rankings has become more ineffective nowadays and many people have stopped using it. The reason is simple. While page content is still used to determine search engine position, there a myriad of other factors that are added into the algorithm.

As page content have less weight than it used to have, applying this technique to your site may have very little benefits, if at all.

Search engines are also optimizing their algorithms so any page that jump out of nowhere to claim on the first page of search result pages will eventually get bumped out every now and again.

What still works?

This is not to say that it is entirely ineffective.

For less competitive or minor keywords, you can still rank in the first page for very little effort. Perhaps with a well optimized page is enough. At the most, add one or two inbound links.

In fact it is used everyday by web publishers and bloggers.

A good example is product review. When a new product comes out to the market — let’s say it is a cell phone, usually there are a surge in search around that phone, specifically up to the brand and series.

Bloggers who blog about this product, usually in the format of news or review, will eventually get into the first or second page of search engine result pages. If they are fast enough, of course.

Often, without any inbound link whatsoever, the page ranks on the first position. If other bloggers or webmasters link to the page, the pages become more important and outrank others.

Before that happens, usually who has the page into search engine first will enjoy the traffic and perhaps some links from others — because chances are other bloggers use that page as a reference for their post.

How to make doorway pages work?

Knowing how easy it is to get traffic based on minor keywords, you should first concentrate your new site for those keywords. Not only does this technique allows you to start building traffic, but most importantly you can begin your link campaign easily this way.

To make doorway pages work, we would create what I call information pages.

For each minor keyword you want to target, write useful information around the keyword or keyphrase. Real content, not spam.

Work on minor and less competitive keywords first, let your pages rank on those keywords, secure or lock the positions and then work the way up.

I would recommend against making thousands of new pages of junk content on your site. That will only devalue your site and get them delisted from search engines.

Instead, do your research and build well optimized pages with real content. This is when doorway page software which automatically generate pages that are very optimized — putting the right keywords in the right positions can make it easy for you.

If you take the time to learn some basic SEO, you won’t need that software at all though.

Doorways pages are named appropriately because they are the bridge or doorway to search engines. There are many ways to deliver doorway pages. Most of them are being mass produced with software tools.

Here are some methods to delivery doorway pages:

1. Static doorway pages

The most traditional or low-tech way to deliver these pages is to create a static page around a keyword or keyphrase.

This page is the one indexed by search engine and also seen by website visitors. Because the visitors don’t land directly on the final page, they must either click on the link to get there.

This method is prone to duplication. Anyone can copy a highly ranked page instantly, modify very few things and hopefully get the same results. Search engines could penalize these pages for duplicate content.

Nowadays, as it depends less on in-page factors to rank on search engines and as the web page creation tool matures, this method becomes obsolete.

2. Meta refresh doorway pages

To overcome the problem with static doorway pages, the webmaster uses meta-refresh command to tell the browser to redirect users to the final pages.

This method becomes obsolete too as search engines no longer accept pages using fast meta refresh.

Meta refresh pages are also prone to duplication.

3. JavaScript redirection

Browsers are redirected to a new URL using JavaScript command. As search engines don’t read JavaScript, this method is more difficult to defeat.

It doesn’t mean that webmasters can’t copy the page though.

4. Server-side redirection.

This could be done by sending search engine to a specially optimized page while redirect users to the actual content by checking the User-Agent string and/or IP address.

As search engines become more intuitive, none of these methods are going to stay for long.

The way these doorway pages work is very similar to what search engines really want from webmasters and publishers. The problem is, these pages utilize junk content and useless information. They are usually generated with software programs, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands of similar pages. If only as a web publisher, we could write useful content one page at a time and mimic how these pages work, we could possibly rank for those keywords too, much more possible than these pages.

In the next post, I will introduce you to what I call information pages. It is not something I invented, but more of basic SEO and using good quality content to mimic how doorway pages work.

Just FYI: Doorway pages are also known as gateway pages, entry pages, jump pages, portal pages, landing pages, among others.

Doorway pages are web pages created for spamdexing — a term used for the act of spamming the index of a search engine.

How is it done?

Introduction to doorway pages

Webmasters who create a doorway page insert results for particular keyword phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. If the page redirects visitors without their concern, then it is one form of cloaking.

These pages are usually visible only to search engine spiders. They contain nothing a typical visitor would be interested in. Human visitors will see entirely different pages because they are what visitors want.

Doorway pages are also known as gateway pages, entry pages, jump pages, portal pages, landing pages, among others.

The purpose of the pages

Doorway pages are usually created specifically for search engines, not human beings. Because they usually are very identical — often being copied as is from high ranking page with very little modification — they pose the risk of being deindexed by search engines.

Many pay-per-click advertisers are also using content rich doorway pages for their campaign landing pages. These pages may employ server side code to count click-throughs, visits, and other user actions for data collection.

The ethical side of a doorway page

The word “ethical” in this context is not really about ethics, but more about complying with what search engines want. Search engines don’t want webmasters to be able to control their search engine rankings but through transparent techniques.

Creating a doorway page is considered blackhat SEO. At the very least it falls into one shade of “grayhat SEO”.

This is obvious if you understand the philosophy behind search engine optimization. Search engines want to crawl and index real pages and do their best to return the best results for each user who search for information. This means it doesn’t include invisible or fake pages that serve nothing but to rank on search result pages.

Most search engines prohibit this practice. They are considered spam. Every techniques that are cheesy should be avoided because if only they work, they won’t stay for long. Plus, if your site visitors find this, your site could lost its trust.

Bottom line - avoid doorway pages

If you define doorway pages generally as those that lead to more informative content, then a homepage is also a doorway to more content on your site. Good navigation and site structure usually make your content accessible to site visitors, but without all the unethical-ness.

Others might argue that using these pages are okay as long as you provide real useful content on the backend. I tend to disagree. There is nothing that guarantees this practice. Moreover, there are ways a page could rank in search engines without having to adopt this blackhat techniques.

During a brief reflection about my business, I discovered that it depends on Google more than anything else.

Being the first who provides many great services, integration and owning the greatest market share in search definitely matter.

The icon on the upper right side of my Firefox browser is almost always Google. That was my tool for searching almost anything, except for a few SEO related queries for which I even use automated tools and browser extensions to do those.

Don’t get me wrong. I still like Yahoo! for being the first to fully index some of my sites. It is great to see how Yahoo begin sending me high quality traffic before Google.

But I would like to see more of them.

Gmail. It is the only mail application I use regularly. I dumped The Bat! more than a year ago. I forwarded all my mails to my Gmail account. The contact form and my customer support goes straight to my Google mail, filtered with the right labels.

AdWords. AdSense. Need I say more?

Perhaps Yahoo Panama is going to still some of the share. I wait that day for long.

I believe being attached to one search engine or any component of a business is not a good thing.

What if one day Google stops sending me traffic? Where should I get my business from?

Competition is good. Diversification is a must.